Monday, August 18, 2008

A Tail of Wonderful Errors

I’ve been enjoying the best of winter in August for about a week now. I was supposed to have 3 full days in Sydney and 5 days in the Christchurch area, but I got cheated out of one of my days in Sydney, which is a real bummer. It was a funny story actually. On my original itinerary, my travel agent had me flying from Istanbul back to London so I could go to Sydney. I thought that was ridiculous, so I said, give me a month, I’ll find my own way back to London and I’ll make it fun. At the time, I didn’t know the exact dates of my Turkey trip, and I ended up with only a day and a half to get from Bodrum, Turkey, to London to catch my flight to Sydney. I ended up booking on my own the same Istanbul-London ticket on my original itinerary. My travel agent actually couldn’t get me onto this flight because they each agent is only allotted a certain number of tickets per plane, so I book via Expedia. So, I was really happy to get a good day to explore Istanbul before heading to London with a 2 hour connection before my Australia flight.

The Istanbul – London flight left on time, so I was expecting no problems for the transfer. It came time to land, and we weren’t landing. Eventually the pilot got on the intercom and told us that the flight tower at Heathrow had been evacuated due to a fire alarm and there were no flights going in or coming out. Our plane had already flown from London to Istanbul earlier in the day, and they decided not to refuel in Istanbul. So we were flying circles around Heathrow and running out of gas. The captain decided to go land in Birmingham to refuel and then make the 25 minute flight to Heathrow when the tower re-opened. We ended up landing around 10PM. Air traffic control decided to let outgoing flights leave before the incoming flights landed, so a lot of people ended up missing their connections. My flight was locked out at 9:30.

Because it was 10PM, British Airways had no rebooking agents at the transfer point in Heathrow, so everyone had to go through customs to rebook. In fact, British Airways only had 1 representative for people coming off the international flights, and they ran into a problem with Boarder Control because the UK requires Visas for some countries, so if you were from a country that required a VISA you couldn’t get to the British Airways counter to rebook your flight. Luckily, I’m from the US and I didn’t need a Visa. I ended up getting on a Quatas flight at 12:15 the next day, plus dinner, breakfast and a hotel room. So I got an extra day in London and missing out on my first day in Sydney.


I lost most of my 2nd day due to jet lag. I didn’t wake up until 2:30PM, but at that point I was ready to take on Sydney as best I could. I’d gotten a flavour for London, Rome, Athens, and Istanbul in roughly 2 days, so I figured I could see Sydney in 2 days. I was wrong. I left Sydney really not wanting to leave Sydney. I don’t think I’d want to leave after a week. Sydney is a walker’s paradise. I’m mostly a fair weather biker, but I LOVE walking in just about any weather. When I got off the train in the center of Sydney, I was in Hyde Park. I knew I had to walk east to go to my target destination, the Darling Harbor and the Sydney Aquarium and Wildlife Center, but I got really distracted. I was in the middle of a beautiful park, full of birds I’d never seen before and trees that looked like the “Tree of Life” from Disney’s Animal Kingdom (cypress trees). The weather was perfect, although the people from Sydney thought it was cold. A high of 19C and lows of 11C (for those used to F, F = (9/5)C + 32, so roughly highs of 65ish). This happens to be very similar weather to the UK in the Summer.









On my walk, I ended up missing the Aquarium and Wildlife Center because I was supposed to be meeting my friend, Paul, for a couple of beers at 6PM and my 10 minute walk from Hyde Park to Darling Harbor ended up being about an hour and a half. The Aquarium is definitely the tourist thing to do at night in Sydney because it’s open until 10PM and I hear it’s wonderful, so figuring that I had another day in Sydney, I decided that I’d go back the following day after my trip to Manly beach.



On my flight delay, I met a number of people very familiar with Sydney and I was told over and over again to (skip a tour of the Opera House) and take a ferry from Circular Quay (pronounced “key”) to Manly Beach and get some fish and chips. On the ferry, there’d be plenty of photo ops to get my tourist picture of the bridge and the Opera house. So on my last full day in Sydney, I got up early and did this figuring it would be a morning/lunch trip. When the ferry landed, I picked up a tourist map and found that there were walking trails all over town, so naturally, I started walking. The further I went, the more wildlife I saw… here’s a lizard,

And a bandicoot (these are apparently pretty rare to see in the wild. One Australian man told me that he’d only seen 3 in his life.

Then I ended up here.



It was at this point that I decided, I’d make this trip to Sydney a mission of finding urban exotic animals and trying to take a picture of all of them. I found this pond on the top of a plateau and I heard frogs chirping all around it. I decided to go sneaking up on some frogs, but then I heard a bird and turned quickly to try to get a picture of the bird, and in the process, I flung my camera into the pond. Not thinking, I jumped ankle deep into the pond to try and save my camera. After I pulled it out, I realized that was it… it was dead. I looked down expecting my foot to be all soaked in water and cold, but to my surprise, my foot was dry. My $20 Easy Spirit shoes were pretty water resistant. This made me happy. My camera was dead because I went chasing frogs and this made me sad. I decided to head back to town for my fish and chips, and then try to find a new camera, because I wasn’t going to miss Paul “Ace” Mason in concert without my camera.
Picture from my new camera (using the flash in the dark)
no flash (the flash would have only shown the foreground and I wasn't close enough for a foreground shot.)
I found a Target, and now I have an awesome brand new 9 Megapixel camera that takes much better pictures that my 3 year old 3.2 mega pixel camera. I’ve been complaining a lot about my camera on this trip, saying I wanted a new camera. And now I have one and I love it. I’ve been very careful not to go chasing after frogs, just birds

And bats

And motorcycles

Form the Botanical gardens, right behind the opera house in Sydney.



Then it was off to China town and Eating World for dinner (BTW, the best Chinese I’ve had outside of China!) Nicky, this picture’s for you, since you requested more food pictures. =) I finished my day in Sydney seeing Ace and the Gronks (his band) in concert at the Excelsior Hotel. I had a ton of trouble getting a good picture of him even with my new camera because he as dressed in black and the lighting wasn’t very good. Here’s my best shot. Of course, this shot would have been impossible with my old camera, so let’s all thank the frogs!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Dear Cappy

We've really enjoyed the pictures. However the one of Paul did not make it onto your blog.

Have fun see you next month!

Love Dad & Mom & the dogs

Cappy said...

All edited. Paul's in there... thought of that right after the post

Anonymous said...

Ooh, Heathrow gives me nightmares. I'm sorry you had difficulties there, but you seem to have navigated the trouble with a bouyant spirit!

Be glad that you didn't get to stay in Sydney too much longer. There is a sad story taking place in the harbor now.

Another tidbit of news from here: Gabe has learned how to pull his own hair. He yanks a fistful, gets upset, and because he is upset, he yanks even harder. I am contemplating giving him a mohawk to prevent this.

*hugs*